


The Care and Feeding of Mammalian Companion Animals

by ineptshieldmaid



Series: The Rehabilitation of Ex-Stormtroopers: A Study In Cats, Pranks, and Spacecraft Mechanics [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: (attempted fluff), (with cat), Anxiety, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, It's not self insert if it's not yourself you insert, M/M, Pranks, Recovery, cats in space!, team ground crew, tooka
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-17
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-21 06:14:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6041254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ineptshieldmaid/pseuds/ineptshieldmaid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Today’s new and alarming development involves Poe Dameron. Poe has a… a companion animal. A tooka. It is male, its fur is mottled yellow and brown, and it has very fluffy fur and great big eyes. It curls up in Poe’s arms, or drapes itself over Poe’s shoulders, in an apparently friendly manner, but Finn has looked up its species in the databanks: it is a predator.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kayloulee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kayloulee/gifts).



> Kayloulee wanted a story about Finn and a cat. I was aiming for fluff and seem to have ended up at hurt/comfort with cat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to the helpful people who pitched in to SPaG and dialect check the draft version on Dreamwidth. I'll do the same for the next chapter (I have this plotted out pretty clearly, it's not going to be an endless WiP), if anyone is super keen to get their eyes on advance material concerning Finn and the tooka.

There are many things about life outside the First Order that are alarming, confusing, or downright baffling to Finn. The nice doctor who is nothing at all like the psytechs he’s used to says it’s normal that he feels anxious and bewildered a lot of the time, but he doesn’t like it.

Today’s new and alarming development involves Poe Dameron. Poe has a… a companion animal. A tooka. It is male, its colouration is mottled yellow and brown, and it has very fluffy fur and great big eyes. It curls up in Poe’s arms, or drapes itself over Poe’s shoulders, in an apparently friendly manner, but Finn has looked up its species in the databanks: it is a predator. It treats people who approach Poe while it is cuddled up to Poe as prey, Finn is pretty confident. Once he saw it swipe Jess Pava with its claws, and it drew blood. 

When Poe turns up in Finn’s bunkroom with the furry predator in his arms, Finn is a little alarmed, but honestly not too much. The creature has free run of this building, although Finn has been told there are sensors programmed in the doors to stop it from getting outside and hunting the native wildlife of D’Qar.

‘Hey, buddy,’ Poe says, and ducks his head to one side as the tooka swipes at his ear for a second. ‘Quit it, gato,’ he says, to the tooka. ‘Uh, Finn, I’ve got a favour to ask of you.’

‘Sure,’ Finn says. He’s not all that busy: he’s still reporting to medical for physical therapy every day, and other than that, he mostly lurks around the hangars, bothering the mechanics. 

‘Can you look after Cabrón here for a few days? The General wants me off-base, nothing dangerous, but Atsy used to watch him when I was on solo missions, and, well…’

Ello Atsy had died in the assault on Starkiller Base, Finn recalls. He feels suddenly very sad for Poe and his tooka. Perhaps it is because he’s sad that he agrees to watch Cabrón while Poe is off-base.

‘Great!’ Poe says. ‘Here, you take him for a minute, I’ll go and get his gear.’

This how Finn finds himself holding a not-insignificantly sized mammalian predator, in the middle of his bunkroom. Poe vanishes out the door before he can cry for help.

Cabrón digs his claws into Finn’s arms. Finn yelps, and drops him. Cabrón retreats into a corner, hissing in Finn’s direction.

Thankfully, Poe returns quickly, carrying a stack of… things in his arms. A tray with sand in it. A pair of bowls. Something that appears to be a toy mouse. Something else that goes jingle. And a cloth, which, when Poe spreads it on the floor next to Finn’s desk, turns out to have a picture of a tooka on it. 

‘I don’t think he likes me,’ Finn says, pointing at Cabrón.

‘Nonsense,’ Poe says. He disappears into the bathroom with one of the bowls. ‘It’s not you,’ he calls, over his shoulder. ‘He hates everyone.’

Poe re-emerges carrying a bowl of water, which he sets down on the cloth. Then he produces a bag of some sort of biscuits, and tips them into the second bowl.

‘You want him to stay _here_?’ Finn says. It comes out more like a yelp.

‘Well, yeah,’ Poe says. ‘I mean, you could go up to my quarters to feed him, but he gets lonely.’ He looks at his chrono. ‘And I really don’t have time to get you access codes, I need to be down in the hangars five minutes ago.’

Nevertheless, he bustles around Finn’s rooms for a few more minutes, setting up… tooka things. BB-8 plugs into the door panel and teaches it to recognise Cabrón’s collar so the creature can come and go.

‘But what do I do?’ Finn asks, knowing he sounds pathetic.

‘Change the sand in the litterbox every day,’ Poe says, ‘give him dry food in the morning, and this is wet food for the evenings,’ he gestures to a stack of cans. ‘Pet him occasionally and tell him he’s a good boy. Easy.’

‘Easy,’ Finn says, weakly. The door closes behind Poe, and Finn sits down on his bed and tries to convince himself hyperventilating won’t help.

* * *

The care and feeding of Cabrón is not easy. For a start, he refuses to eat while Finn is in the room. He does eat while Finn is out, but by the second day it has become clear that he will not poop, whether Finn is in the room or out of it.

Finn starts constructing nightmare scenarios involving Poe’s return to find his tooka has exploded because Finn fails at pet care. He resorts to asking his doctor, who tells him she’s no expert on tooka physiology but most mammals do not explode from temporary constipation. Apparently they, humans included, get projectile diarrhea first. This is not as reassuring a prospect as the doctor seems to think, given the mammal in question spends most of its time on Finn’s desk.

Finn is pretty sure Cabrón still hates him, but he also won’t leave Finn alone. He sits on the desk and watches Finn while Finn reads or watches holovids. Every so often, he pushes something off the desk with a crash. This, Finn is pretty certain, is intended to remind him who’s boss. This is probably also the creature’s aim in sitting outside the fresher and staring straight at Finn the whole time Finn is in there. Finn is used to being naked in front of other people: in fact, until he got here, he’d never been naked _alone_ before. Naked in front of other people is fine. Naked alone turns out to be quite nice. Naked in front of a tooka who hates him is another matter entirely. He’s certain Cabrón is assessing him for vulnerabilities to exploit.

Cabrón wanders about the building during the day, and reappears in Finn’s rooms shortly before the mess opens, whereupon he conducts an important campaign of yowling until Finn fills his food bowls. Then, rather than eat while Finn is in the room, he follows Finn to the outer doors of the building as Finn goes to the mess. He sits in the doorway watching Finn go: his collar is set up to shock him if he tries to pass over the threshold.

‘Poor critter,’ Jess Pava says to him on the second day, looking down at the tooka. ‘I don’t think it’s right, shocking them like that.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s conditioning by pain, isn’t it?’ Pava says. ‘I know, I know: we can’t have him eating all the native birdies. But it’s not fair. He doesn’t understand. You wouldn’t do that to a sentient being.’

‘You wouldn’t?’ Finn asks.

Pava gives him a strange look. ‘No, I wouldn’t,’ she says. Finn makes his excuses and dashes off in the opposite direction to the mess, feeling ill. There are a lot of these moments, when it seems like he’s operating on a completely different system from everyone else. It’s particularly upsetting because he _knows_ he had a different way of thinking about things to the rest of his Stormtrooper cohort. He knows his idea of ‘the right thing to do’ is more likely to match up with Poe and the General and their people than with the First Order. And yet, these moments keep happening.

* * *

Poe turns up on the morning of the third day, right before Finn leaves for PT. Finn is very, very glad to see him. He supposes he and Cabrón have made progress overnight, in that Cabrón condescended to use the litter tray while Finn was asleep. He then stood by the edge of the bed and yowled until Finn woke up, then stood by the tray and yowled until Finn gave up and took the tray outside to empty it. In the dark. In the rain. While wearing pyjamas. 

‘Hey, buddy, I missed you!’ Poe exclaims, when Finn opens the door. Something in Finn’s chest goes flip-flop. Then Poe swoops down on the tooka and drapes him over his shoulder. Right.

‘I have to go to debrief right away,’ Poe says, extending his free arm to pull Finn into a hug. Finn ends up meeting Cabrón’s eyes as the tooka peers around the back of Poe’s neck. Cabrón does not approve of Finn hugging Poe, Finn is sure. ‘I’ll come back this afternoon to pick up his stuff, is that okay?’

‘Sure,’ Finn says. At least he has PT to go to, so Cabrón probably won’t murder him between now and then.

‘Hey, why’s the litter all wet?’ Poe demands, turning reproachful eyes on Finn. ‘You have to change it regularly, or -’

‘I did!’ Finn protests. ‘It was raining and I went outside to change the sand at _three am_ because your tooka - who hates me - insisted, and _all the sand outside was wet too_. Because it was _raining_.’

‘He made you get up in the night?’ Poe asks, picking up the entirely wrong end of that speech. ‘Oh my stars, you are an asshole, gato.’ _Gato_ , Finn had learned shortly after moving into the barracks, means cat (as in Loth-cat, which is a kind of tooka) in the language Poe spoke growing up, especially when he’d lived with his grandparents as a small child. Apparently _gato_ had been among his first words. Everyone in the fighter corps knows this, and teases Poe mercilessly about it.

‘He used to do that to Atsy,’ Poe says, grinning at Finn. ‘They came to an understanding eventually.’

Finn is unable to decide between complaining that Poe did not _tell_ him his pet is a slave-driver, and demanding to know how anyone comes to an understanding with a being so full of cunning and resentment. Before he can decide on either, Poe glances at his chrono, swears, and deposits Cabrón on the bed.

‘Debriefing!’ he says. ‘Gotta go, see you later!’ He disappears out the door, and Cabrón hisses angrily at Finn.

* * *

Poe Dameron loves his tooka. He really does. It’s just… the little guy is an _asshole_. So much an asshole that it wasn’t even Poe who named him Cabrón. Muran had tried, for about three weeks after acquiring the beast, to assign him a sensible name, but spent so much time swearing at him that Cabrón just stuck. Cabrón loves Poe like he’d loved Muran, and he tolerates what remains of Rapier Squadron, along with a few of Poe’s new Resistance buddies. But as a general rule, Cabrón hates everyone regardless of origin, species, or personality.

Red and Blue squadrons had long ago gotten used to the presence of a hostile feline in the barracks. The new recruits, all wide-eyed and in awe of everyone, have taken Cabrón in their stride as a sort of squadron mascot, which is fine by Poe. A few got their hands scratched early on for trying to shower him in affection, but they learned fast. 

By and large, Poe thinks that a little hissing and scratching is good for everyone. Sometimes, though, he finds he wishes Cabrón were just a little, well, nicer. Case in point: when Poe is lounging on a couch in the barracks rec room, and has the good fortune to have Finn slumped against his side, waving one hand in the air while talking earnestly about the base vegetable gardens and his latest adventures in dirt-grubbing. Pava is sprawled on the couch opposite, with her head in the lap of Whraapu, the Wookie from maintenance, both watching some kind of terrible holosoap. It’s not as if he and Finn are having a private snuggling experience, but it’s nice. Poe could cope with being Finn’s headrest on a regular basis. Which is why it would be _nice_ if his territorial asshole of a tooka didn’t take the opportunity to climb into his lap and sink claws into whatever bit of Finn he can reach.

‘Hisssss,’ Cabrón says, fur standing on end as Finn yelps and scrambles upright.

‘Hey,’ Poe says, dumping the tooka off his lap. ‘Not nice, Cabrón!’

Cabrón makes a desultory swipe at Finn’s ankle, more for the look of it than anything else, and then turns his back on Poe and Finn both.

‘He really doesn’t like me’ Finn says, sounding dejected. Everyone else takes Cabrón’s disdain in stride, but it seems to actually bother Finn.

‘He’s just an asshole,’ Poe says. He does not pull Finn back to him, because it’s one thing being someone’s casual headrest, and another thing entirely to pathetically seek snuggling from one’s juniors. ‘He doesn’t like anyone.’

‘He likes Whraapu,’ Finn points out. Cabrón has curled up on the Wookie’s feet, and is actually purring. 

‘Wookies are a special case,’ Poe says, with as much authority as he can muster. Whraapu growls something that is probably Shyriwook for _damn right we are_. ‘Look,’ he says, wrenching up his sleeve. ‘The little bastard savaged me this morning! And me his best friend and provider of meals!’

‘But what were you doing to him?’ Pava asks, because she’s too smart for her own good.

‘Tryingtoputhiminaharness,’ Poe admits, in a rush.

‘In a _what_?’ Finn demands, and from the look on his face he must be drawing conclusions about alarming tooka torture devices. To be fair, so had Cabrón.

‘A harness! I picked it up off-base, I thought I could take him for walks outside…’

‘You’re pathetic, Dameron,’ Pava says, but Finn’s face lights up.

‘I bet he’d love that,’ Finn says, sincerely.

‘He really doesn’t.’ Poe waves his scratches under Finn’s gaze. ‘He really, really doesn’t love that.’

Finn runs one finger over Poe’s scratched-up arm. It’s not exactly a kiss-it-better, but it’s gentle and sweet, and Poe is so, so gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ed: oh, and due credit to TNG; that gifset of Data being told to pat the cat and tell him he's a good boy provided the launching-point for this. (Although Finn is nothing like Data, really.)


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter contains both the hurt and comfort part of hurt/comfort with cat, and also pranks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Projected length has blown out from two chapters to three! I grew an OC who turned out to be important to Finn, and Kayloulee lodged a request for pranks.
> 
> Much love to Kayloulee for SPaG checking this installment.

Finn is just starting to feel like he knows the ground beneath his feet on D’Qar base. He turns up for PT; he puts in a few hours work most days in the gardens, enjoying the novel experience of dirt beneath his fingers and of growing _food_. He progresses from bothering the mechanics in the X-Wing hangars to cleaning up after them: sweeping, tidying tools and screws and bolts, doing odd jobs that don’t require any particular skill. 

Every so often he has meetings with General Organa, who is a very frightening lady but also very nice. He wants to help so he tells her everything he can remember about the Stormtroopers and the Finalizer and the First Order in general. She always has a cup of tea and something sweet for him, takes care not to make it into an interrogation. But he’s tired afterwards, tired and sad. He doesn’t like being alone, those days, but he doesn’t want to face the melée of the mess, which is so much louder and more chaotic than anything he used to know. So he holes up in the rec rooms in the barracks he shares with Red and Blue squadrons, and someone will bring him caf, or dinner. Usually it’s Poe, but sometimes it’s Jess Pava or Nien Nunb or one of the new recruits. 

The ground shifts treacherously under his feet when Red and Blue squadrons are deployed off-base. It’s their turn to put in time on the Echo of Hope, Poe explains, the Resistance’s only military-standard cruiser, which had been on the other side of the galaxy during the whole Starkiller Base kerfuffle. Admiral Ackbar has command now, and Poe’s old friends Karé and Iolo are Starfighter Corps captains under him, but their squadrons are due for time on base and Poe’s new recruits are due to spend some time in deep space.

‘So I wanted to ask you,’ Poe says, a few days before he’s due to fly out. ‘Would you take care of Cabrón for me? I had him with me last time we were on the Echo, and he really didn’t take well to living in deep space.’

‘For… for three months?’ Finn squeaks. ‘But he hates me!’

‘Naaaah,’ Poe says, ‘he likes you better than he likes Bastian.’ This is true, but not exactly indicative: Cabrón _loathes_ Lieutenant Bastian with a deep and unconcealed passion. ‘Look, if you really don’t want to do it, Karé will take him, they get along okay. It’s just, this building’s access codes is already programmed for him. And I thought you might get lonely…’

That’s how Finn finds out that he’ll be bunking all alone in a barracks made for twelve, and also how he agrees to spend three months with a tooka that hates him. At least he can keep the creature’s food and litter somewhere other than his bedroom, this time: no one else will be around to care.

* * *

Red and Blue squadrons fly out early in the morning. Finn sets up Cabrón’s food and litter in the rec room, and tells the tooka it’s just them now. Dagger and Stiletto, the other two squads, aren’t here yet, and even when they get here, apparently they have their own barracks over the other side of the base. Poe’s people get to keep their rooms and leave their stuff behind on D’Qar. Finn knows that’s not an efficient use of space, but it seems kind of nice. It’d be nicer if he didn’t have the entire building to himself and one hostile tooka.

He doesn’t expect to see much of Cabrón for the next three months, but maybe he’s lonely too. Finn wakes up in the night to find big beady tooka eyes staring at him from the desk. He’d think that was sort of sweet, if it weren’t for the fact that as soon as he’s awake, Cabrón pushes something off the desk with a crash. The routine of Watching Finn in the Fresher also resumes the very first day after Poe’s gone.

Finn is going to be murdered in his sleep by a vengeful feline, and no one will know, because he’s living alone in a barracks built for twelve.

A second shock comes a few days later when he turns up at the Blue Squadron hangar where he’s used to following the mechanics around and helping out. He wasn’t expecting to see Poe’s ship, or any of the others he recognises, but he was expecting to find _some_ ships. Dagger and Stiletto squadrons had arrived with great pomp and circumstance: surely they ought to be here? There are also almost no ground crew around.

Finn breathes deeply and tells himself that if there had been a base-wide callout he would have heard the emergency sirens.

‘Oh, hey there,’ comes a voice behind him, and he turns to find Stretch, one of the ground crew he knows. ‘Didn’t think we’d see much of you for the next few months.’

‘Where is everyone?’ Finn asks.

Stretch gives him a funny look. ‘On deployment? Echo of Hope?’

‘I mean… you guys. Mechanics.’

‘Yeah, ground crew go with the ships,’ Stretch says. ‘Just me and Whraapu left to look after the skeletons.’ He jerks a thumb over his shoulder at a partially-assembled X-Wing and a couple of other ships Finn doesn’t recognise. ‘Dagger and Stiletto brought their own crew back with them. Can’t leave people out in deep space indefinitely.’

‘You can’t?’ Finn asks. This is going to be one of those conversations. 

Fortunately, Stretch is a man of few words, and after a terse explanation of personnel rotation, he says to Finn,

‘Well, kid, you want to learn how to take apart an engine?’

Finn says yes, because, well, he _does_ want to learn how to take apart an engine. He remembers Rey on the Millennium Falcon, talking at top speed about hyperdrives and fuel leaks while he couldn’t tell one kind of tape from another.

Taking apart engines with Stretch and Whraapu turns out to be fun. Reassembling the salvageable parts into working engines is harder, but interesting. Finn thinks Rey would be proud of him, wherever she is. They’ve had word that she’s alive and so is Skywalker, but nothing more. The General made sure to tell Finn that. He thinks, although it’s hard to tell, that she might be very angry, and he hopes it’s not with Rey.

Poe is definitely pleased, when Finn tells him about taking apart engines. Poe sends messages every week or so, in the batches of personal communications and routine files that make it through to D’Qar in big dumps of data all at once. Poe probably just wants to make sure Cabrón is fine and hasn’t starved to death after murdering his only source of food in the night. He always asks after Finn, though, and tells little stories about Jess and the others Finn knows. So Finn sends messages back, and while he records holovids of Cabrón (Cabrón hissing at the camera, Cabrón knocking things off Finn’s desk, and once, Cabrón watching him in the fresher) he has to say something, so he talks. He tells Poe about working with Stretch and Whraapu, and Poe sends back stories about learning to maintain his mother’s A-Wing as a kid on Yavin 4.

But then things get complicated. It turns out Stretch used to be a training instructor with the Republic Navy, and he talks to someone from Stiletto's ground crew who used to do something similar on Mon Cala, and then they talk to the Sergeant Major and she talks to the General and somehow Finn finds himself training to be a mechanic. Which is cool. Except it doesn’t just involve learning to take apart engines: now he has to know why and how they work. He has to know about torque and lightspeed and hydraulics, and he has to read books and do calculations, and even when they’re up to their armpits in grease Stretch will be talking about depressurisation and exit speeds and Finn just. Finn finds it all very hard to keep up with.

Overall, Finn appreciates the fact that the Resistance don’t wear helmets unless they have a good reason. They even have helmets with no face shields, just to protect your head if there’s a chance something might fall on it. He likes seeing people’s faces. He likes that people can see _his_ face, and how easy it is to make people - especially Poe - laugh just by making funny faces at them.

There turns out to be a downside, though. It’s less scary, learning from people when you can laugh with them. But you can see when they’re disappointed or frustrated with you, too. And they can see when you’re frustrated and angry and afraid.

So when he’s struggling with the electrical coupling inside of one of the old A-Wings at the back of the hangar, he can tell Stretch is getting irritated, and really wants to lean in and do it for him. And Stretch can tell _Finn_ is getting frustrated and he’s afraid of disappointing Stretch, even though he knows nothing bad will happen to him (they’ve been over that).

‘Okay, kid,’ Stretch says, patting him on the shoulder gently. ‘How about you leave it for the day, try again tomorrow?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Finn says, automatically. ‘I’ll read the manual, I should know it by now, I’m sorry…’

‘Don’t apologise so much,’ Stretch says, patting him awkwardly again. Finn can tell he doesn’t feel comfortable when Finn does this, spills out apologies and lets everyone see how afraid he is. Stretch isn’t like Poe, who talks to Finn and tells him about times he’s screwed things up himself. Stretch isn’t even like Whraapu, who doesn’t talk much because Finn doesn’t understand Shyriwook, but who makes sympathetic noises and understanding expressions when Finn talks to her. Stretch doesn’t like talking about things that aren’t ships, and honestly, Finn can understand that.

‘Knock off,’ Stretch advises, which is ridiculous, because Finn doesn’t even have a shift schedule. ‘Chill out, do something fun this evening.’

Fin does not do something fun. He can’t even put together in his mind what _something fun_ might consist of. He returns to barracks, where Cabrón comes scurrying into the hallway to assess him for threats, and then retreats back to whatever he had been doing. Finn goes and sits on the couch in the rec room, and it’s not until he’s done so that he realises the rec room is where people normally do _something fun_. Two months ago, Jess and Bastian and _Poe_ and all the rest would have ended up here, eventually, and even if Finn wasn’t having fun exactly, he would have been happy to be with friends.

The sadness, the feeling of missing his friends, washes through him and almost drowns out the frustration, the uncertainty and the fear that had come home with him from the hangars. Finn finds he’s crying, and it’s a relief: all the tension seeps out of his bones and he lays his head back against the couch and weeps. The tears go on for much longer than is justifiable. He doesn’t care.

At some point, Cabrón leaps up onto the back of the couch. Finn looks over at him, concludes he doesn’t look like he’s about to pounce, and continues crying.

After a few minutes, Finn mutters “What are you lookin’ at, huh?” at the tooka. Cabrón tilts his head to one side and continues observing Finn. Somehow, he looks less hostile than he does when Finn is using the fresher.

‘Mrrrew,’ Cabrón says. It’s not his Dinnertime Yowl, at least. Finn isn’t ready to stop crying and feed the feline yet.

Cabrón pads across the back of the couch to Finn’s shoulder, and headbutts him. Gently. 

‘Hiya, gato,’ Finn says, because that’s what Poe calls him when Poe’s being affectionate. The words come out wobbly and damp. Finn probably needs a tissue.

‘Mrrrew,’ Cabrón says, more insistently, and headbutts Finn again. Finn sniffles, blinking his eyes free of tears, and he moves his hand automatically to push the tooka away. Fortunately he remembers in time who he’s pushing around, and stops his hand. He turns it palm-up, for good measure.

Cabrón licks his fingertips. Finn jerks back in shock. Cabrón bristles, but refrains from attacking him. This is not exactly a grand display of affection, but Finn is lonely and Cabrón is the only being around, so perhaps that’s why the next headbutt causes Finn to choke up and his eyes to stream tears again.

‘Mrrrrow,’ Cabrón says, and rubs his head right up into the arch of Finn’s neck. It tickles, which causes Finn to laugh and cry at the same time.

Finn is forced to consider the possibility that perhaps Cabrón does not hate him. He has seen the tooka rubbing its head up against both Poe and Whraapu, and Cabrón demonstrably does not hate either of them.

Very, very cautiously, Finn moves his hand to stroke Cabrón’s head. Cabrón butts against his fingers for a moment, and then, quite without warning, leaps down off the back of the couch.

After a second, he walks around in front of Finn and cocks his head at him, looking smug. Finn interprets that to mean _Hah! Got you to stop crying!_. To be perfectly honest, Finn would be willing to treat the tooka-petting interlude as an interruption rather than cancellation of his crying fit, but Cabrón obviously has other ideas. Starting with commencing his Dinnertime Yowling Campaign.

Finn sighs, wipes his eyes on his sleeve, and goes to fetch the can opener.

* * *

Finn might be imagining it, but he thinks Cabrón is a little bit nicer to him after that. When the tooka comes skittering into the hall at the sound of Finn’s footsteps, Finn crouches down and holds out a hand, and more often than not, Cabrón presents himself to be stroked.

Then one night Finn wakes up to find the tooka is sitting on his head. Admittedly, he wakes up from a dream in which he’s being smothered by a helmet that gets smaller and smaller and is also warm and fuzzy, so he flings Cabrón off him, and they both freak out. But it’s a fairly safe bet that the creature likes him, or at least finds him non-threatening, if he’s being sat on in the night.

Perhaps it is the singular experience of being trusted by a creature that hates everyone, but Finn decides he kind of likes Cabrón. 

None of that justifies his deciding to try to get Cabrón into the harness Poe had bought for him. It’s just that Finn thinks, even if Cabrón hates everyone, he’s probably lonely with Red and Blue squads gone. Fewer people around to hate.

He genuinely expects to get clawed for his pains, but, much to his shock, he gets Cabrón into the harness and the harness onto a leash. Then he realises he has no idea how to override the sensors on the doors which interface with Cabrón’s collar and shock him when he tries to leave. So, not to lose a good opportunity, he tries walking Cabrón around the barracks. Cabrón just about tolerates it long enough for Finn to make a recording to send to Poe, and then sits his furry ass down and refuses to move.

Eventually, Finn takes Cabrón outside to explore. They get summarily kicked out of the kitchen gardens, on the grounds that tookas dig up soil and poop in it. They spend some time just hanging out on one of the grassy banks that cover the barracks and hangars. Finn basks in the sunlight. Cabrón chases butterflies until his leash brings him up short.

Finn doesn’t _mean_ to take the tooka with him to work in the hangars, but on the second or third expedition with the harness, he figures Cabrón would love to see Whraapu, so they wander inside. Cabrón _is_ pleased to see Whraapu, and rubs as much of himself as he can manage up against her legs. Must be the texture, Finn thinks. Whraapu is furred and so is Cabrón. Cabrón probably thinks they have a lot in common (although they don’t, because Whraapu is as friendly as Cabrón is hostile).

Whraapu pets Cabrón on the head, and then asks Finn to fetch a wrench - or more precisely, barks “wrench” at Finn, because Finn wouldn’t understand a polite request in Shyriwook, but he’s picking up basic mechanical workshop nouns. Finn loops Cabrón’s leash around the leg of a trolley, and somehow he ends up putting in a few hours’ work before he realises it. Cabrón hisses what Finn has deduced is his “take me home to my litter tray at once or I will pee on everything you love” complaint, and Finn complies. But he brings Cabrón back with him the next day.

He suspects he should feel strange about that, bringing his pet - no, someone else’s pet - to work with him. But Stretch and Whraapu don’t seem to mind, and he likes having Cabrón about. Watching the tooka menace everyone who comes into the hangar - not that many people do, with Red and Blue squads both away - turns out to amuse both him and Stretch a great deal.

Cabrón is with him the day Stilleto squadron send one of their recruits over looking for left-handed nails. The poor kid - woman, really, she must be Finn’s age - edges past the hissing tooka and over to Stretch to make her request. Stretch listens, poker-faced, and shakes his head mournfully.

‘No, sorry, we’re dead out of left-handed nails here. You could try barracks maintenance?’

‘Oh,’ the recruit says. ‘But sergeant said…’

‘Used the last of our stock the other day,’ Stretch says, sounding regretful. ‘Might be a while before we get any more in.’

Finn feels a hot prickle up the back of his neck. He knows this joke. It must be standard across the galaxy. He’s not sure how the woman hasn’t even figured out that X-Wings don’t _have_ any nails in them, but if she’s anything like the cadets Finn used to work with, she takes orders first and thinks later.

‘Hey,’ he says, as the woman turns back to edge past Cabrón. ‘There’s no such thing as a left-handed nail.’

‘No such…’ The woman pauses, and then her face falls. Finn hates to be the one to tell her that, but someone will eventually, and at least he’s not going to laugh in her face.

To his surprise, she bends over double with laughter.

‘Oh my _stars_ ,’ she wheezes. ‘I can’t believe I fell for that!’

‘It’s easy to do,’ Finn assures her. ‘I fell for it myself. When I was, um.’ He stops, because this woman is new, and maybe she doesn’t know who he is. Her eyes go a little wide, so she’s clearly figuring it out.

‘Stormtroopers do that?’ she asks, still giggling. 

‘Yeah,’ Finn says, not sure why it’s so damn funny. ‘Yeah, um, I guess some things are the same everywhere.’ He can feel Stretch’s gaze boring into the back of his head. They’ve had more than a few discussions about things which _aren’t_ the same everywhere, but, well, evidently this isn’t one of them.

Or maybe it is, because Finn wouldn’t have stepped in like that on Starkiller Base, not in front of a superior officer.

The woman sidles past Cabrón, apparently still laughing. Finn considers turning around to Stretch to face what’s coming to him, but he hasn’t got the guts. He crouches down next to Cabrón instead, and the tooka nuzzles into his palm. He scritches gently behind Cabrón’s ears, and the fact he has to be slow and gentle if he doesn’t want Cabrón to freak out and claw him helps to steady him.

He doesn’t expect Stretch to crouch down beside him.

‘So,’ Stretch says. ‘Stormtroopers have the left-handed nail joke, too, huh?’ Finn nods. ‘What about striped paint?’

‘Uh,’ Finn said. ‘No? Nothing’s striped on Starkiller Base.’

‘Huh,’ Stretch says. ‘Guess not.’ He gets that slightly panicked expression on his face that Finn is coming to associate with personal conversations. ‘I, uh. I guess you don’t much like the kinds of people who pull pranks like that?’

Finn doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t want to _lie_ , because clearly Stretch can tell he doesn’t like it, but he knows telling the truth will backfire on him, too. Behind them, Whraapu says something in Shyriwook. Stretch looks up at her for a second, and then back to Finn.

‘It’s different when it’s people you can trust,’ he says.

‘It is?’

‘Um. It’s fun? It’s funny? You saw Clennan just now, she thought it was hilarious!’

‘Yeah,’ Finn says, quietly. ‘But I don’t see why.’

Stretch turns back to Whraapu in what is clearly a plea for help. Finn follows his gaze, in time to see Whraapu shrug.

‘Fat lot of good you are,’ Stretch says to her. Turning to Finn, he frowns deeply, and then says, ‘Clennan knows nothing bad’s going to happen to her for not bringing back left-handed nails, and nothing bad’s going to happen to her for figuring it out. That’s the difference.’

Finn doesn’t understand that, but the woman _had_ thought the whole thing was hilarious.

‘Sorry for interfering,’ he says.

‘It’s okay, kid.’ Stretch stands up. ‘It was a good thing you did. Not everyone finds it as funny as she did.’

Finn stands up in turn, and Cabrón twines around his ankles. It’s reassuring, like having a small furry missile that loves you.

Whraapu says something Stretch, and Stretch’s face breaks into a grin. ‘That is a terrible idea,’ he says, ‘and I love it.’

Neither of them will tell Finn what this terrible idea is for some days.

* * *

Poe is not quite willing to look head-on at the fact that dispatches from Finn have become the highlight of his day, on the irregular days they turn up. It’s not as if he doesn’t get other mail, both from D’Qar and from other parts of the galaxy. He hears from his papa a lot more when he’s with the Echo of Hope than when he’s back in base.

It’s just… Finn’s holovids are hilarious, for a start. Poe’s not sure why he only ever sends footage of Cabrón and not his own face, but five minutes of his asshole tooka glaring at the camera while Finn chatters on about anything and everything is great value. Three minutes of Cabrón staring fixedly at Finn naked in the fresher - naked, but off-screen - was, well, Poe’s not sure he wants to call that great value. It _was_ funny. Finn had ranted on about how the tooka evidently didn’t trust him to clean himself since he couldn’t do it with his tongue. Poe just had to try very, very hard not to imagine Finn naked and licking… anything. Or being licked. Just. Generally, the idea of nakedness and the idea of licking and the idea of Finn should not go together. Not if he wants to retain his sanity.

And then sometimes Finn’s vids are just shriekingly hilarious, no dirty thoughts required or invited.

‘Oh my _stars_ ,’ Poe gasps, and pauses the vid. ‘Pava, come here, you have to see this!’

‘Lemme guess,’ Pava says, ‘you’ve got another video of your asshole pet.’

‘Well, yeah,’ Poe admits. ‘But you really want to hear this story.’

‘And so, and so,’ Finn says, wheezing with laughter from behind the camera, ‘Whraapu handed me this little bottle of _stuff_ , it was bright red and you had to put a lot of it in to get results but when you did, _kriff_...’ He pauses for a second. Cabrón, still the only being in sight in the vid, licks one paw fastidiously. ‘It’s safe to eat, though,’ he says, conscientiously. ‘ So I went over to Stiletto’s hangar, you know how they’ve got a little room with caf and hot water and a fridge and all that? I had to be really really careful, there’s so many people coming and going from their hangar. But I found the room eventually and it was empty and I _turned all the bantha milk purple_.’

‘Oh sweet Force,’ Pava breathes, behind Poe. ‘He didn’t.’

The camera shakes for a second, and then suddenly Poe finds himself looking at Finn’s face for the first time in months. Said face is crinkled up in laughter and might be the most adorable thing Poe has ever seen.

‘And, and,’ Finn says, words tumbling out of his mouth in a rush, ‘no one gets in trouble and it’s okay because it was everyone’s milk, no one has to be singled out!’ Poe’s heart twists: he doesn’t really want to know why that’s such an important caveat to Finn, but he can guess. ‘And then,’ Finn wheezes, ‘the best thing is, the best thing is: I heard them talking in the mess and they think it was Dagger squad that did it!’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Re: purple milk - Kayloulee gifted to me a prank she had been involved in, the dying of milk blue right before morning tea/coffee break. However, the only milk I could confirm as existing in Star Wars, bantha milk, is ALREADY blue. So let us suppose that Stiletto Squadron keep that in their break room and Finn added red dye to make it worryingly purple.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Due credit to kayloulee and trojie both for looking over this when it was mired in too much plot not enough kissing.

At the end of three months, Finn expects Red and Blue squadrons to both come roaring home. Instead, Red stay out in space, and Stiletto are sent out to join them. Still, after the silence of the past three months, Finn loves the sound of feet on the stairs and voices in the rec room. By some sort of unspoken communal agreement, Blue Squadron’s pilots intend to celebrate their return with one of the large, poorly-regulated parties that are hallmarks of life on D’Qar base. Dagger Squad seem to be involved. Possibly some of the mechanics. Finn isn’t sure: he likes that the Resistance are easy-going about boundaries between ranks and units, but he can never predict who will cross those boundaries and who won’t.

So Finn is happy to see his friends back, but Cabrón isn’t. The tooka hides under a table and refuses to come out, hissing and spitting at everyone, even Poe.

‘Give it up, Dameron,’ Pava says, from where she’s sprawled on one of the couches. ‘Your pet is an asshole and now he hates even you.’

‘I know he’s an asshole,’ Poe says, but he doesn’t get up from the floor, where he’s propped up against the wall next to Cabrón’s hidey-hole.

Finn thinks about all the recent days when Cabrón had come to greet him when he entered the barracks, or curled up beside him and gone to sleep, or purred when Finn petted his head. He feels terrible: Poe deserves that, Cabrón is _Poe_ ’s tooka, not Finn’s. And at the same time, he can’t shake the awareness that Cabrón hasn’t come near him since Red Squad back, and he feels terrible, because he misses that and he doesn’t really have a right to.

Several hours into the party, Finn is starting to feel more sympathy with Cabrón’s anti-social stance. The General has stopped by. A General! In junior officers’ barracks! Finn shouldn’t be surprised, given Poe is technically a senior officer and he’s in the same barracks as the new recruit lieutenants, and for that matter with Finn, who doesn’t even hold rank. Nevertheless, you would never find General Hux drinking beer with mechanics, so Finn spends a few moments gaping at General Organa before Poe swoops down on him with some kind of… pink drink.

‘What’re you… oh,’ Poe says, following Finn’s gaze to where the General is deep in conversation with Whraapu and Jess Pava. A soft smile dawns over his face. ‘I wasn’t sure she’d come,’ Poe says, to Finn. ‘I asked her, but she’s a busy lady.’ Which answers one thing: apparently parties on D’Qar base aren’t organised by telepathy. Apparently Poe asks people.

‘Mind this?’ Poe says, depositing his drink (as virulently blue as Finn’s is pink) in Finn’s spare hand. 

Finn has no idea what to make of the sight of Poe dancing with General Organa. Finn doesn’t really know what to make of dancing in the first place: Stormtrooper training is not big on dancing. But even he can tell Poe and the General both know something about dancing that the hotch-potch of people wiggling in the space that’s been cleared for it do not know. In fact, possibly they know a different _kind_ of dancing: Finn has seen Poe dance at parties before this, and he’s pretty sure this is different. Not just because, unlike Captain Kun, the General does not seize this opportunity to feel Poe up. Everyone else seems to agree this is a particularly good example of dancing: there is a general round of applause when Poe twirls the General under his arm. 

Parties are fun, but Finn is tired, and not sorry when people start to clear out and stagger back to their own barracks. The General left hours ago; Cabrón hasn’t been seen all night; Poe is scraping one of the new recruits off the couch where she has evidently drunk too much. Finn collects the trash, because that gives him something to do and people tell him “Thanks” sincerely when he does it. _Sanitation_ , he thinks. Transferable skills!

Pretty much everyone else has gone to bed by the time Finn has finished putting things in order. Probably he puts the rec room in _too_ much order, no one else seems to mind if the chairs or tables are pushed askew, but a lifetime of training is hard to break.

When Finn lets himself into his own room, he is met by a hiss and a plaintive yowl. Cabrón parks himself a few feet in front of Finn and stares up at him, eyes huge. _Oh shit_ , Finn thinks. He forgot to get BB-8 to override the access codes on his door which let the tooka in.

Finn is about to conclude he’ll deal with it in the morning, when Cabrón pads forward and rubs himself right up against Finn’s legs, like he does with Whraapu. Finn bends down automatically to pet the tooka’s head, and then he feels terrible. Here he is petting Poe’s tooka when the creature won’t even talk to Poe right now.

‘I’m sorry about this,’ Finn says, and picks Cabrón up. He’s never tried picking the tooka up before, but he’s seen Poe do it. Cabrón ought to drape over Finn’s shoulder, but… nope. Finn hangs on to the hissing, clawing bundle of fur and elbows his door back open again.

It’s not until Poe opens his door (which Finn has not so much knocked on, because he can’t get a hand free without losing hold of Cabrón, as lurched against with his shoulder) that Finn realises there’s no particularly good reason for him to be doing this.

‘Is everything okay?’ Poe asks, looking from Finn’s face to the extremely irate Cabrón in Finn’s arms.

‘Yeah,’ Finn says. ‘I, um, I forgot to change the codes and I he was in my room. I thought you might… Ouch!’ This last is directed at Cabrón, who has managed to get a strike at Finn’s chin with his claws.

‘Put him down!’ Poe says, a little sharply. Finn lets go of the tooka and Cabrón streaks between his legs and off into the corridor somewhere. ‘You won’t get anywhere holding a tooka who doesn’t want to be held,’ Poe says, less sharp but still reproachful. And then he adds, frowning, ‘I thought you said you two were getting along now?’

‘We were,’ Finn says. ‘It’s just…’

‘Want BB-8 to come down and reprogram your door?’ Poe asks.

‘I, uh, I guess?’ 

‘You coulda just booted him out, no need to get yourself scratched up,’ Poe says, and he leans a little closer. ‘Hang on, let me look at this,’ he says, and pulls Finn into his bunkroom. Closer to the light, he tilts Finn’s head to one side and examines the scratches on his chin. ‘Should be okay,’ he says, fingers warm against Finn’s cheek. ‘You’re up to date on all your shots, right?’

‘Think so,’ Finn says. 

‘Well, just don’t provoke any more tookas if you want to preserve your dashing good looks,’ Poe advises, letting go of Finn and stepping back.

‘My dashing…’ Finn blinks. ‘No, wait, I was bringing him back!’

‘Yeah, I get that,’ Poe says. ‘Got sick of him sitting on your head in the night, did you?’ Finn had told Poe about that, in one of the holovids he’d sent.

‘No,’ Finn says, truthfully. ‘I just… thought you’d want him back.’

Poe frowns at Finn for a second, and then pushes him to sit down on one of the armchairs. Poe has the biggest bunkroom, by right of rank, and it has reading chairs and a small table as well as a desk. 

‘Go over that again,’ Poe says, perching on the edge of the table. ‘You brought me an angry tooka, who has the run of the whole damn building anyway, because you thought I’d want him?’

That’s the problem Finn realised when he got to Poe’s door: Poe’s rooms are set up to let Cabrón come and go, it’s not as if him delivering the tooka by hand ensures Poe will have the benefit of his pet’s company.

‘I’m sorry,’ Finn says. Poe ignores the apology, or almost ignores it - there’s a little nod of his head that says he’s heard it, but he doesn’t make a fuss over trying to talk Finn out of it. Finn continues, ‘I just thought… it’s not right. He’s your pet, and I know you missed him.’ Finn looks up at Poe, wondering if he’ll try to deny that.

‘I did, yeah,’ Poe says. ‘But if you want to kick him out, you don’t have to bring him bodily to me. It doesn’t work, you saw how he ran off.’

‘I don’t _want_ to kick him anywhere!’ Finn says. ‘I just thought… I thought he missed you, too, but maybe I was wrong?’ He wonders if Poe really dotes on a tooka that actually hates him. Poe might. Poe has a lot of affection to spare. 

‘You think…’ Poe tilts his head to one side slightly. ‘You think because he’s being a bastard right now, that means he didn’t miss me?’

‘Doesn’t it?’ Finn asks. Great, he thinks. Not only are there whole galaxies of sentient beings he doesn’t understand, now he turns out to be fundamentally wrong about tookas too.

‘He’s acting out _because_ he missed me,’ Poe explains. ‘He’ll get over it once he figures out I’m not going away again tomorrow.’

‘But you go away all the time,’ Finn says.

‘Yeah, and he does this every time,’ Poe says. ‘Punishing me, and probably reminding himself he’s a big strong gato who doesn’t need any petting.’

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ Finn says. He’s very tired, and tooka psychology makes no sense.

‘Sure it does,’ Poe says. ‘Kids do it all the time,’ he adds. ‘Ma said once Papa went away for a month, and I wouldn’t speak to him for days when he got back.’

‘How old were you?’ Finn asks.

Poe shrugs. ‘Oh, three? Four? Papa did some consulting work, training sessions and the like, for the New Republic army when I was around that age.’

‘Would you want to…’ Finn shuts his mouth, suddenly aware he’s going to blurt out something that reminds Poe that he didn’t have a normal childhood.

‘What? Be on my best behaviour and impress him?’ Poe asks, apparently reading his mind. Finn nods, dumbly. Poe rubs one hand over his forehead. ‘Not that I remember this at all,’ he says, ‘but one of my little cousins was kind of the same when her mama joined the Navy. I reckon it’s about being a little shit to make sure you can’t actually drive them away. That they’re gonna come back even if you are a horrible snotrag, right?’

Finn thinks of Rey, and tries to imagine her being a “horrible snotrag” to the family she’d waited for. He can’t. But then he can’t imagine what kind of family left her on Jakku in the first place. He can’t imagine much about families, when it comes down to it.

‘So Cabrón,’ he says, because maybe tookas are safer to think about, ‘he’s acting like he hates you…’

‘Because he’s scared I’m gonna go away and not come back, basically.’

Finn does not point out that Poe very easily _could_ go away and not come back. 

‘BB-8?’ Poe says, and the droid burbles from the corner. ‘You got enough charge to go help Finn with the door codes?’ 

Finn gets up to go, and Poe pulls him into a hug. Finn wasn’t quite expecting it, and stumbles a little, but Poe holds him steady.

‘Good to see you, buddy,’ Poe says. ‘Thanks for looking out for the asshole for me.’

* * *

‘Where’s your friend?’ Stretch asks, when Finn shows up to work without Cabrón in tow. 

Finn shrugs. ‘Poe’s back now,’ he says, and hopes Stretch can’t tell that he finds it weird, a little scary, not having the tooka on his long lead snooping around the hangar. He hadn’t realised it, but he must have formed the habit of seeking Cabrón out, petting him or just talking to him, when he started to get stressed. Maybe Stretch hadn’t realised either, because surely if he had, he’d have pulled Finn up for forming maladaptive routines.

Cabrón doesn’t always come skittering into the corridor when Finn gets back to barracks, now. Finn thinks maybe he can’t hear the difference between Finn and everyone else who comes and goes. He still sees the tooka around the building, and he’s pleased to find that he’s still allowed to pet Cabrón, and sometimes Cabrón will curl up at his feet.

‘You’re privileged,’ Pava says, the first time she sees this.

‘Yeah,’ Finn agrees, and he can’t help grinning. ‘I am.’

‘They say the way to a man’s heart is through his pet,’ Pava says, waggling her eyebrows at him.

‘They do?’ Finn asks. Then, feeling a sense of mischief that he doesn’t often exercise, he adds, ‘That’s not very efficient. A long knife under the ribs and up should do it.’

Pava goggles at him, and Finn awards himself mental points. She’s quick on the uptake, though.

‘You little _shit_ ,’ she says, shaking her head but evidently impressed, ‘I know perfectly well Stormtroopers aren’t trained in knife fighting.’

‘I have hidden depths,’ Finn says, trying and failing to keep his features impassive.

‘I see why Dameron likes you,’ Pava says, rolling her eyes a little. ‘Although I don’t fancy kissing you quite as much as he does.’

‘He _what_?’ Finn yelps. Pava just gives him a disgusted look and stalks out. 

‘What the fuck,’ Finn says, to Cabrón. Cabrón declines to comment. Finn concludes he ought to put the whole peculiar conversation aside as a variety of banter he can’t yet parse. Teasing people about non-existent romantic or sexual relationships seems to be a key component of Resistance base conversation, he’s figured out that much. The preferred targets are either highly improbable matches - such as Whraapu and Admiral Akbar - or highly probable ones. He would not have estimated the likelihood of Poe wishing to kiss him, Finn, as highly probable, but Jess didn’t seem to have the hyperbolic tone she uses when waxing lyrical about Whraapu’s undying passion for the Admiral.

There is also the fact that, when it comes down to it, the notion of kissing Poe actually seems like kind of a good one, to Finn. It’s somewhat difficult to un-think that thought, once he’s thought it. The next few days aren’t exactly easy ones: the hangar is now a lot busier and Stretch has Finn learning flight line routines, priming X-wings and filling fuel tanks and learning the flag signals for marshalling ships into hangars and around the tarmac. Finn would be stressed out about that anyway, and now he keeps thinking about the fact that kissing Poe is a really, really attractive idea.

Finn knows how kissing works, if in theory more than practice. What experience he has in sexual liaisons did not feature much in the way of kissing, or anything that Stretch would describe as “canoodling”. Canoodling seems to feature quite high in the sexual and romantic lives of the Resistance’s troops. Jess seems to canoodle with a variety of people, human and non-human. Snap Wexley has a wife who works in infotech, and they canoodle in the rec room often enough that Jess keeps a supply of hard candy around to throw at them.

While all this canoodling happens, Finn has never seen Poe canoodle with anyone, unless you count Cabrón. Perhaps this means Poe does not canoodle at all? Finn has no idea how to determine if this is the case, but now he has to exist with the knowledge that he would like to _try_ canoodling, and apparently his first pick would be Poe.

With all this on his mind, it’s not surprising that when Poe corners him on the way to the mess one evening and says ‘ _Another_ one of your fans came to talk to me today,’ Finn’s first thought is that Poe, too, must be on the receiving end of jokes about kissing. He stops dead.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I don’t understand why they think it’s funny…’

Poe looks at him oddly for a second. ‘I don’t think it’s supposed to be funny?’ he says, cautiously.

‘Oh.’ Finn doesn’t know what to do with that. On the one hand, someone thinks Poe might legitimately want to kiss him; on the other hand, Poe looks pretty grim about it, so someone is probably wrong.

‘I… you know you can hang out with Cabrón any time you want, right?’ Poe says. Then he amends that to ‘Any time you want and he’ll let you, but seriously, he likes you!’

‘Um,’ Finn says. ‘I know?’

‘Then why have five different people accosted me and told me off, complete with lectures about the proven effectiveness of companion animals in assisting people recover from trauma?’ Poe demands. He looks… agitated, but not really angry.

‘They have?’

‘Wait, twenty seconds ago you knew about this and thought it was a bad joke,’ Poe says, looking baffled.

‘No, no, I thought… something else,’ Finn says, flustered. ‘Why… why are people angry with you?’

‘They’re worried about you,’ Poe says, more gently than before. ‘People noticed you around base with Cabrón, and now they’re concerned that I’m… depriving you of his company?’

‘But he’s your pet!’ Finn says, immediately. And then, ‘How could you be depriving me? I looked after him and now you’re back!’

‘Yeah,’ Poe says, ‘I am, but you could take him out any time you liked!’ He narrows his eyes at Finn for a moment. ‘ _Do_ you miss having him around? In the hangar and so on?’

‘I guess I do,’ Finn admits, and it feels like admitting a weakness. ‘But that’s not…’

Poe rests his hands on Finn’s shoulders. ‘Finn, I have a very serious proposition for you.’

‘Um,’ Finn says, because he’s back to thinking about kissing again, and that is so very clearly _not_ where this is going.

‘Would you like to take my pet out?’ Finn has a suspicion Poe is hiding a laugh. ‘I’d do it myself,’ Poe says, ‘but he still won’t go near the harness for me.’

‘I,’ Finn says. ‘He’s _your pet_.’

‘A pet isn’t an accessory you keep to yourself,’ Poe says. ‘I inherited him from Muran, and… force spare us, if something happens to me, he’ll end up with someone else. Maybe you. No one’s told _him_ we treat tookas like property, after all. As far as he’s concerned, we’re his humans.’

‘Oh,’ Finn says. He probably should have thought about what would happen to Cabrón if Poe died or got captured - it wasn’t as if the latter hadn’t already happened to Poe. Blue Squad had already lost someone, one of their new recruits, just in the three months they were on the Echo of Hope. But for some reason, Finn had looked at Cabrón and simply decided that Poe would always come back, because he had Cabrón to answer to.

Tookas don’t understand about galactic conflicts, but suddenly Cabrón’s hostility to Poe on his return makes a lot more sense. Finn has a lot of conflicting emotions all at once. On the one hand, he wants to kiss Poe - both right now, and in a general, ongoing sense - and if he does not do so, perhaps something will happen to Poe and he’ll _never_ get to kiss him. On the other hand, if by some miracle he does get to kiss Poe, that will not stop anything happening to him. Finn knows that. His experience in canoodling is non-existent, but did have… friends. Of a sort. Slip died in front of him on Jakku. He has no idea if any of his former squad, or any of the handful of people he has had sexual liaisons with, are even alive now. If they aren’t, it’s quite likely that they died when he, Finn, helped blow up Starkiller Base.

‘Hey, Finn, hey,’ Poe says, and his voice filters into Finn’s mind as if from a distance. ‘What did I… hey,’ he says, abandoning the question in favour of putting his arms around Finn’s shoulders and hugging him tight. ‘It’s okay. I gotcha.’ Finn realises his breath is coming fast and shallow, and his knees feel all wobbly. He wishes he could blame it on Poe’s proximity, but he knows better.

‘I’m okay,’ he says, shaking his head and leaning back. Poe lets him, but keeps one hand between Finn’s shoulderblades, rubbing gently. Finn thinks, a little giddily, that being petted by Poe might be nearly as good for calming down as providing pets to Cabrón.

‘What happened there?’ Poe asks, gently. Finn thinks for a second about trying to explain how he got from thinking about Cabrón to counting how many of his former colleagues’ deaths he’s responsible for, and decides against it.

Unfortunately, his brain isn’t firing on all cylinders, and maybe he _can_ blame it on Poe’s proximity, because instead of an explanation he blurts out,

‘Jess says you want to kiss me.’

Poe blinks and drops his hand from Finn’s neck. ‘She does? When? Oh _kriffing hell_ , Finn, I’m sorry, I’ll talk to her…’ Poe is evidently embarrassed, but that doesn’t confirm either way whether or not he wants to kiss Finn. ‘Is this what you meant when you said you didn’t understand why it was funny?’ he asks.

Finn nods, dumbly.

‘You can tell her to fuck off, you know,’ Poe says, ‘if you don’t want her to make jokes like that. Or any kind of jokes, really.’

‘No, I don’t mind…’ Finn says. ‘It’s not _bad_.’

‘Okay then,’ Poe says.

‘But I…’ Finn snaps his mouth shut, and then thinks _why the hell not?_. ‘Do you, though? Because I… I’d kiss _you_ ,’ he says. He suspects there is a calm, suave way to make that pronouncement, but he doesn’t know it, so he sounds fervent and earnest instead. At least Poe probably can tell he’s not joking.

Poe blinks at him. ‘You would?’

Finn nods.

‘What exactly did Jess say to you?’ Poe asks, which seems like a distraction tactic to Finn, but he tells Poe anyway. Poe’s eyebrows go up. ‘That’s positively tame, coming from Jess,’ he says. Which is true: he’s heard Jess make much more anatomically specific suggestions about other people.

Before Finn can figure out what to say next, Poe leans in and kisses the corner of his mouth. It’s over quickly, almost before Finn notices it, but it doesn’t seem to be a brush-off: Poe is smiling at him, all crinkly-eyed. Finn leans over and copies the movement, dropping a kiss to the corner of Poe’s mouth. Poe turns a little, turning the quick kiss into a gentle press of lips on Finn’s.

‘That what you had in mind?’ Poe asks him.

Finn nods, happily, leaning into Poe’s side. And then, for the sake of clarity, he adds, ‘But more. I was thinking of _canoodling_.’

Poe cracks up laughing, and wraps his arms around Finn tight enough to squeeze his ribs a little. 

‘Yeah, okay,’ Poe says, ‘I have to admit I was thinking something similar myself.’ Then, somewhat disappointingly, he disentangles himself and turns Finn toward the mess again. ‘ _After_ dinner.’

Finn foresees a lot of teasing from Pava in his future.

* * *

After that, in addition to his new schedule of kissing Poe, Finn makes a point of taking Cabrón out and about. Not every day, but on days when he knows the hangar will be quiet, he ends up bringing the tooka to work with him again.

The day General Organa comes looking for him personally, she finds Finn on his knees in the back of the hangar behind the old A-wing, dangling a long piece of string in front of the tooka.

‘Heyyyy Cabrón, who’s a clever tooka?’ Finn coos. Pava says he and Poe are as bad as each other. Finn doesn’t care. ‘Cab-cab-cabrón,’ he sing-songs, jerking the string just before the tooka pounces on it.

‘Do you know you’re calling that tooka an asshole?’ a voice says, behind him.

‘I, what?’ Finn spins around, loses his balance, and lands on his butt in front of General Organa. ‘Ma’am!’ he stutters, scrabbling to his feet.

‘Or possibly bastard,’ the General says, ignoring Finn’s flailing. ‘It doesn’t translate exactly.’

‘What doesn’t?’

‘Cabrón,’ the General says, nodding toward the cat. ‘Means asshole.’

‘His name?’ Finn says. ‘His name means… Poe calls him an asshole all the time!’

‘And named him asshole, apparently,’ the General says. ‘Is he?’

‘Is he what?’

‘An asshole,’ she says, patiently.

‘Poe? Poe’s not an asshole!’ Finn would work for General Organa over any other officer he’s ever met, except possibly Poe, but something about her just seems to disconnect his mouth from his brain.

‘No, the tooka. Is he an asshole?’

‘Uh… not really,’ Finn says, and he realises it’s true. ‘He’s scared a lot.’

‘Hmm,’ the General says. ‘Mr Finn, I wanted to speak to you… informally.’ She looks around the hangar, which is looking particularly dishevelled today. ‘But perhaps not here. Walk with me?’

Finn goes, even though the fact that she’s calling him _Mr_ Finn probably does not mean good things. Whraapu waves a spanner and barks something which Finn is pretty sure means 'I'll keep an eye on the tooka', only probably with more swearing.

‘How are you finding working with Sergeant Yaver?’ the General asks. Sergeant Yaver is Stretch. It had taken Finn far too long to figure that out. He is known as Stretch, in one of those peculiar pieces of Resistance logic, because he is short and sort of round.

‘Good, ma’am,’ Finn says. When the General leaves the silence open, he adds, ‘I like the work, and the lessons are interesting.’ This is true. They are interesting, even though they’re difficult and studying alone is a strange, slightly frightening experience. 

‘Have you thought about what you want to do next?’ 

‘Next?’

‘Next,’ the General confirms. ‘Medical tell me you should be fit for indefinite release, soon.’ Finn knows that: his back will always be stiff, and he’ll have a strict regime of exercises and stretches he’ll have to do, but he’s used to regularly working out.

The doctors have been talking to him as if they expect he’ll be staying on D’Qar, but it suddenly occurs to Finn that he doesn’t _know_ that. Maybe the Resistance, having patched him up, will pack him off on the next transport. Or hand him over to what’s left of the New Republic government, perhaps.

‘We’re not sending you away,’ the General says, in one of those disconcerting moments where Finn suspects she can read minds. ‘But you can leave, if you want to. It’ll be easier, with a clean bill of health. I still have… contacts, planets where people owe me personal favours. We can arrange asylum for you. Naboo, perhaps.’

Finn stops dead, and the General stops too, turning to look up at him. ‘That’s asylum as in refugee status,’ she says, ‘a home and right of residency. Not asylum as in prison for the insane.’

Oh. Good.

‘Or,’ the General says, ‘you can stay with us. But I want you to think about that carefully. The Resistance cannot guarantee you safety. The First Order do not know exactly where we are, but they will find us eventually. And they will know you came to us: they may be looking for you.’

Finn goes cold, for a second. Then he drags in a breath, and tells himself it’s nothing he didn’t already know.

‘These planets,’ Finn says, slowly. ‘They’re not safe, either. Nowhere is, not from the First Order.’

‘There are plenty of places in the galaxy a man like yourself could disappear. Take a different name, we can’t guarantee this one has stayed secret.’

Something in Finn rebels at the idea of a new name. He’s had this one for less than a year, it should be easy to shed. But he’s not fool enough to think he isn’t particularly attached to this name because it’s the one Poe gave him, and the one Rey calls him by.

‘Even if I could… stay unrecognised,’ he says. ‘That wouldn’t make me safe. The First Order kill people who just get in their way.’

‘They do,’ General Organa agrees. ‘You could make it your business not to get in their way.’

Finn hasn’t talked with the General about how he’d tried to leave Rey and Han on Takodana. He hasn’t talked to anyone about that, really. Now, he wonders if _Han Solo_ told her, if they’d had time between planning the assault on Starkiller Base and arguing with one another for Han to fill her in.

‘Or,’ the General says, ‘you could enlist with us.’

‘Then at least I’d have people backing me up when I get in their way?’ Finn asks. She’s looking at him very solemnly, watching his face for his reactions.

‘Something like that,’ she says. ‘I know it’s a lot to ask of you, to be a soldier again. But if you aren’t ready or don’t want to take on this fight, we need to look into other options for you.’

‘Oh.’ Finn says. 

‘If the First Order turn up in orbit here,’ the General says, ‘Everyone on this base will pick up a weapon and fight. Even the medical staff. Even the catering crew. And certainly the mechanics.’

‘I’m good with a blaster,’ Finn says, although she knows that already.

‘Yes,’ the General says. ‘But if you aren’t willing to sign up for that, then… it’s not a matter of our defenses,’ she says. ‘Or, it’s not only that. This base has the bare minimum of non-combatants on it at any time. We all know what we signed up for. The only people dying under my command, if I can help it, are the people who signed up to be under my command.’

Finn thinks about that for a second. This is not the same logic by which the First Order had kept Starkiller free of civilian staff. This is one of those ethical things he doesn’t quite understand, although in this case, he thinks he almost gets it.

‘Civilians die all the time,’ he says. ‘Look at the Hosnian system.’ 

‘I know,’ the General answers. ‘I can’t stop it. I can’t even promise you no Resistance campaign ever ends in civilian casualties. All I can offer you is that you needn’t be one of them.’

‘Can I think about it?’ 

‘Please do,’ the General says. She pats him on the arm, but it’s not condescending. Comforting, but not condescending.

* * *

Poe is in his bunkroom, mending a rent in his flightsuit, when Finn knocks on his door. Cabrón, who has deigned to sit with Poe this particular evening, bristles and stalks over to inspect the door even as Poe says ‘BB-8, can you get that?’ 

BB-8 opens the door, and Finn hovers in the doorway.

‘Hey,’ Poe says, and then he tucks his needle away, because Finn looks shaken up. ‘Come in. What’s up?’

Finn comes in, and Cabrón goes straight up to him and twines around his legs. Finn looks from Poe to Cabrón and back again, oddly stricken.

‘Hey, no, pet His Highness first, worry about me later,’ Poe says, and Finn ducks his head, smiling a little. He drops to one knee to pet Cabrón properly, which the entitled little shit evidently approves of.

‘I told the General I’m enlisting, today,’ Finn says, staring down at the floor.

‘Enlisting - with us?’

‘Yeah.’

‘That’s… that’s great!’ Poe says, but Finn doesn’t look like it’s great. He looks… he looks like Cabrón’s the only thing keeping him from bursting into tears. Poe thinks he sees what Stretch and the rest meant about the tooka calming Finn down.

‘You did want to, right?’ Poe asks. He leans forward, not liking the fact that he’s looking down at Finn, but not quite sure if kneeling on the floor will help.

‘Yeah.’

‘Then what’s…’

‘I’m scared,’ Finn says, quietly. Poe gives up and slips off his chair to crouch next to Finn. Cabrón glares up at him, like he suspects Poe of intimidating Finn or something.

‘We all are,’ Poe says, hand hovering over Finn’s shoulder. He wants to say something about _but you fight anyway, that’s what makes the difference_ , but he supposes if Finn’s this scared and still enlisted, then he’s worked out the motivational speech for himself.

‘I didn’t,’ Finn begins, and then stops. ‘The general offered to find me somewhere else to go, and I nearly took it.’

‘Why didn’t you?’ Part of Poe wants to hear _Because of you_ , but the rest of him thinks Finn has far bigger factors to consider than Poe. And he’s not sure that he would want to be Finn’s only or even primary reason for staying: not if it might be better or safer for him to go.

‘I wanted to be… useful,’ Finn says, which isn’t quite the answer Poe had expected. ‘I’d have left you, and Jess and Whraapu and Rey and Stretch and everyone.’ 

_Mrrrrew,_ Cabron puts in, protesting the fact that Finn has stopped scritching him. 

‘Yeah, even you,’ Finn says, to the tooka. ‘And I hate the First Order, but that’s not why I stayed, either.’ He leans into Poe’s hand, and Poe shifts so they’re both sitting on the floor, Poe’s arm around Finn’s shoulder.

‘Why then?’

‘I’m useful,’ Finn says. ‘I’m useful here. To you.’

‘You’re more than just useful to us,’ Poe says, heart twisting.

‘Yeah…’ Finn says, which isn’t quite an agreement. ‘But I figured: if I’m going to be useful to somebody I might as well be useful to… to people who do what’s right.’

Poe thinks about his time in the Navy, and he has to concede, Finn has a point. Better to be useful, and useful to a cause, than not.

‘I appreciate you telling me this,’ he says, because he can tell it isn’t easy.

Finn laughs, a little. ‘I didn’t mean to,’ he admits. ‘I came looking for Cabrón.’

‘I knew you liked him better than me,’ Poe says, smiling at the back of Finn’s head.

‘No!’ Finn says, suddenly defensive, whipping around to look at Poe. ‘No, I don’t mean that!’

‘Finn,’ Poe says, and he’s torn between amusement and the heart-tugging sense he’s gotten used to associating with Finn, ‘I promise, I do not mind if you love my tooka more than you do me.’

Finn looks stricken for a second, then he seems to figure out that Poe’s joking. 

‘Besides,’ Poe adds, just to drive that point home, ‘he watches you in the fresher. That’s a bond I can’t compete with.’ 

‘Literally hundreds of people have seen me in the fresher,’ Finn reminds him. ‘Stormtroopers don’t do privacy. It’s not much of a competition.’

Poe laughs, and kisses the top of Finn’s head. He is really, truly going to leave it at that, because he is a gentleman and this is an Important Conversation. Finn, however, leans back and smirks at Poe.

‘But if you really feel like you’re missing out, I’m sure Cabrón can be persuaded to share…’


End file.
